June 15, 2011

Wednesday Linkspam

I contend that if you insist that asexuals remove every instance of sexual privilege from the list that is also experienced by non-asexuals, then in order to be logically consistent, you also would have to remove items from your own list that are shared with other privilege checklists. Otherwise, you’re making a special exception for asexuals just to be exclusionary.

For me (not necessarily for anyone else, but for me), it’s like the asexual community is one big happy basket full of kittens, all different colors and breeds, but people keep coming along and deciding they want to take home all the kittens except the calico ones, or all the gray ones and not the rest. And that’s upsetting to me, because I don’t want to lose any of my asexual kitten-siblings and I don’t want to be taken away from them.

Asexuality is about breaking through that barrier of invisibility, misunderstanding, and misconceptions constantly and hoping that when you take a breather the barrier won’t patch itself up. Asexuality is invisibility because everybody assumes everybody wants/needs sex and unless you say something you’ll be taken as another sexual being.

What I really think about all this is that while members of the LGBT community may or may not consider asexuals to be queer, we’re still a large community of some of their closest allies, not to mention the huge overlap–the vast majority of asexuals I know of, and who are active in the community, are themselves queer, being either homoromantic, panromantic, trans, or rejecting gender binaries and heteronormativity in some way.

From observing all forms of media, as well as the attitudes and relationship organizations of the people we interact with on a daily basis in our personal lives, the following points may be concluded about the hypersexual nature of Western Culture.

With Freud we have inherited a dangerous notion of essentialized SEX DRIVE—which has produced a form of sex normativity so totalizing that it is nearly impossible for me to bring up asexuality without people—queers and non-queers alike—giving an extremely reactive response.

Asexuals are not (or at least, not yet) the subject of irrational levels of disgust or mistrust, but neither are they universally systematically privileged within religious groups for the simple fact of being asexual, and in fact they often face many, if more subtle, just as difficult problems as members of the Church.

Barney and Sheldon are two of the major represented aromantics who aren’t magical aliens. I keep trying to positively re-appropriate them because they both have, to my warped view, an incredible depth- you can weave out of either of them a story of strength, coping strategies, positivity and ingenuity.

And the fact of the matter is that I can never explain everything. Despite how many definitions and distinctions the asexual community has come up with, I still can’t explain just how my relationships work- there just aren’t the words for it. So people make assumptions, and I am unable to correct them.